79 Things We Can All Agree On

There are plenty of things to fight about, but look at how many things we see eye to eye on

Feb 7, 2012

Peter Yang

On the occasion of the seventy-ninth year of Esquire. Because even though America is rife with serious social divisions and toxic political partisanship and mutual contempt from sea to sea, there are some things that, regardless of party, religion, or class, we can agree are great, lousy, true, false, beautiful, stupid, delicious, or crazy.

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Peter Yang

Bill Clinton

Even his staunchest enemies now regard his presidency as the good old days. He has become the rare consensus figure in a country that has lost all sense of consensus. So we talked to him about where it went, and how we might get it back.

J.B. Smoove and Larry David are the best black-white duo since Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. Or maybe Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis.

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Bruce Glikas/Getty

No way Chris Christie would appeal to America as much if he were of a more average size.

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Roberto Gonzalez/Getty

The Sarah Palin episode in American politics is a bafflement.

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But it reminds us: The electoral college should be abolished.

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Bernd Schifferdecker

Bono should sing more, talk less, and never write at all.

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Boss (on Starz) is as good as anything Chris Albrecht brought into being when he was running HBO.

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Siri.

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Ezra Shaw/Getty

Sooner or later, the Monday after the Super Bowl must become a national holiday.

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Alex Wong/Getty

The Obama presidency has been a disappointment for everyone involved.

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Alex Wong/Getty

Even if he's accomplished more in his first three years than any of his five predecessors.

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Symphonie via Getty

Kids, career, marriage. In that order.

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Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

Kevin Durant...

…is the best combination of talent and personality in sports today.

Maybe the first nonasshole to win back-to-back basketball scoring titles since George Gervin in the 1970s. "I want to be one of the greatest players of all time," he once told me, taking a walk around his neighborhood on a beautiful fall day. "But I don't think you have to be a bad person to be a great player." (In a game that spawned the devil in Michael Jordan, Durant's calculus qualifies as revolutionary thinking.) And this once-in-a-generation joy, the brightest light on the brightly lit Oklahoma City Thunder, this man who will be twenty-three years old just this one time, spent the autumn of what should have been his triumphant fifth season goof-rapping in the recording studio, killing time on Twitter, even playing flag football with the kids in Stillwater. He's one of those rare athletes whom you might find actually doing anything. But because of history's most asinine lockout, the one thing he did not do — which also happens to be the one thing he does like almost no one else — was play basketball. We've lost irreplaceable moments of Durant on the floor; worse, what we will see of him for the rest of this crippled season will be nothing like what we should have seen. Every game will represent a kind of alternate history, even more rushed and frenzied than it normally is. No player gets much time, not of this sweet time, at least, and now there will always be a hole in what should have been one of basketball's all-time narratives: the story of Kevin Durant, long and quick and fueled by love. —Chris Jones

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Whoever rebranded rich people as "job creators" should a) win some kind of award and b) get to work on rebranding nuclear power.

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Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The one hundredth birthdays of Julia Child, David Packard, and Fenway Park are worthy of celebration.

No matter the differences, you can always find one area of agreement between polar opposites.

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Janis Christie via Getty

Banks are the worst.

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Brian Bahr/Getty

Followed closely by the NCAA.

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NBC

SNL is pretty good these days.

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World Perspectives

The United States needs an active manned space program. With its own spaceships.

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US Navy/AP Images

Navy SEALs.

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David Zimmerman

Baltimore...

... is America's next great underdog city, now that New Orleans is (sort of) back on track. They feel weirdly the same as you walk around them today, these twin objects of David Simon's obsession: pockets of vibrancy surrounded by stretches of ruin; an overarching sense of police and political corruption; humid enough in the summer to melt your pants; a delicious selection of seafood pulled from polluted waters. Whether you prefer Baltimore or New Orleans really comes down to whether you prefer crab dip or crawfish, The Wire or Treme.

The difference is nobody talks about Baltimore and its particular brand of suffering. It has absorbed slight after slight for years, taking them like gut punches, because what else was it going to do? Its current mayor took over after the last one resigned in the wake of embezzlement and perjury charges. Local police statistics have been cast repeatedly into doubt, so no one knows if violent crime is down or up or by how much. It is indisputably three hundred thousand citizens smaller than its peak. It does not have professional basketball or hockey teams, and its baseball team is only marginally professional.

But because its death spiral has been slow — unlike Katrina's short, sharp leveling of New Orleans — it has continued virtually unnoticed by the rest of the country. Even Newark gets more attention. Which Baltimoreans might actually prefer. This city, even in its decay, has a sweat-soaked, beer-stained, grim-faced cool to it; you get the sense that even if it were possible to snap your fingers and make all of Baltimore look like its rejuvenated harbor, like beautiful Camden Yards — still the best ballpark in the majors — Baltimoreans might actually resist it. The people who are still in this city, who are still of this city, like the people who remained in New Orleans, are here because they chose to stay. Together, they've decided to make their homes in Baltimore, a city without sentiment, without much left of its ego, deserving of our love precisely because it has never asked for it. —Chris Jones

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